Lately I have been thinking about expectations, it is now summer and we all have some sort of expectations about what a ‘good summer’ should be like.   We all have expectations, expectations about how our life should unfold, how our children and spouse should behave and the meridian of expectations we hold for ourselves down to how our days should play out.   I suspect expectations arise from a lower level of consciousness, perhaps from things not resolved or worked through from our childhood.   Expectations of any kind often lead to disappointment, frustration and even anxiety and depression.   Things just aren’t as we expected and we honestly do not know how to move forward from this sometimes.  

Awareness, and not judgement, is always the first step towards personal growth and movement towards more spiritual levels of consciousness.  So, I ask you to entertain the word spaciousness, perhaps the opposite of finite expectations.  Can we consider making space around the order we so crave, the deep-rooted desire to feed our own ego by having everything align the way we would like things to.  Father Richard Rohr suggests that moving toward this sense of spacious neutrality is actually moving us closer to God.  I think of God as the backdrop, the spacious place from which all love and expressions of loving awareness and action ideally arise from.  Fr. Richard Rohr says this:  At the level of contemplative consciousness, we move beyond dualistic, either/or thinking. At this point, life and death, goodness and badness are not opposites. The one does not cancel out the other. There is enough spaciousness for everything to belong, a return to an elemental innocence, some kind of radical “okayness.”

I love this ‘radical okayness’, or as I often say making peace with our reality.   It is when we struggle with what is, especially when it is not what we expected, ‘this is not what I signed up for,’ mentality that we must learn to pause, lean in and perhaps consider is there something to be learned here?   Without judgement we notice how we cling to those things we like, attachments, and try to move away from things that we do not like, aversions.  Yup, we all have them and it is a good idea to get to know a few of yours so that you can learn to navigate them with a bit more grace, perhaps with a deeper well of okayness.   

This way of moving into the world with a bit more neutrality also allows for an open-ended, open-hearted acceptance of the unknown.  This can be so hard for the type A, always moving towards a goal aligned with a fixed outcome generation.  This sort of unknown is akin to anxiety and arises from not having a loving net of grace to fall into which I call faith or relationship with God.   I am not trying to lead anyone towards the direction of any specific faith.  We all must find and feel our way toward spaciousness as we slowly release the grip of expectations and the constant desire to do and achieve.  It is though this that we learn to navigate this life and evolve and grow.   Honestly, I think this is difficult to do in the world without some sort of spiritual practice. 

Father Richard Rohr has a book entitled The Naked Now.  I love this phrase and try to embody it.    It reminds us to be present; it is only in the present where we meet the spaciousness of God and we have any chance of attaining happiness and contentment in a challenging world.  Of course, this is a practice, just like yoga, fishing, running, meditation or commitment to prayer time… what ever spiritual practice works for you.   We acknowledge that we forget to meet the moment as it is and that God truly is in all of it, the messy and the beautiful, the sunset and the chaos and heartache of life AND we return to HIM through remembrance and practice.    Richard says this:  It seems that simply allowing ourselves to be here, to recognize the sacrament and the grace of the present moment, is enough to allow God’s loving gaze to happen. What we are doing in the allowing is returning the gaze. That’s it. We are completing the circuit and saying it’s okay.  

I love this sentiment that when we allow for the present moment, (the place where God resides) we begin to make peace with our reality and release expectations.  In this conscious action to pause and allow the loving gaze of God to be upon us we then ‘return the gaze’.  Like all relationships this is a two-way street. Perhaps, when we simply look up, expand our view and gaze at God’s creation he sees us and blesses us, ‘completing the circuit of okayness’. 

My hope for you as move into this season and every season is that you take time to simply be.  Just for a little while perhaps, release planning mind, the mind that can scheme and expect and can honestly interrupt the natural flow of life.  I wish you the ease of spaciousness and the grace of not knowing and not always having it all figured out. Try on the practice of not having an agenda and simply fall into grace with a knowing that can not be seen or proven but felt in your heart as you feel the gaze of God upon you, within you,  all around the moments of your life and in all of God’s creation.